by Deon Meyer
When Griessel had finished, she said: ‘I will go with you.’ She slid open her desk drawer, took something out and put it into her pocket.
The drive to Parklands, beyond Table View, took over half an hour. Kaleni sat at the back. She spoke only once, when they turned off the N7. ‘I would like to do the talking,’ she said to Cupido.
‘Yes, Colonel.’
At the Olive Park townhouse complex in Folkestone Street Kaleni had to make a call to have the gate opened. It was a very short conversation; the colonel spoke brusquely in Xhosa.
Thandi Dikela opened her front door. They could tell from the fear in her eyes that she knew why they were there, although she still said, with spirit: ‘Tell me you caught them.’
Griessel had brought the documents in his murder case. When they were seated around the coffee-table in her open-plan living area, he snapped open the lid and took them out. He kept them on his knee for now.
She looked at the documents, shook her head nervously. The bush of long, thin African braids shivered.
‘Thandi,’ Cupido said, ‘it must have been terrible for you to find your father like that, Tuesday afternoon. We can just imagine, you must have been in shock, and there would have been the grief and everything. In that condition, anyone will do things they later regret. So we want to say that we understand. We absolutely understand. But today we need you to be very honest with us.’
Griessel could hear his colleague trying hard to speak compassionately, probably for Kaleni’s sake.
‘I have been totally honest,’ she said, and sat dead still, as though the suspense was paralysing her.
She didn’t look at Cupido, only at Kaleni.
‘We think you made a mistake on Tuesday. You forgot to wipe the notepad. The one in his desk drawer, the one from which you tore the page for the suicide note.’
‘I never did that,’ she said, without conviction, just an instinctual reflex denial.
‘We have your fingerprints on the pad,’ said Cupido.
‘No, no,’ said Thandi. ‘I must have touched it some other time.’
‘We don’t think so. We also have a partial print that matches yours on the suicide note itself. You missed that when you wiped the note and the pen, after forging your father’s handwriting.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ she said, her voice rising. ‘Mbali, you know me. Tell them it wasn’t me. Why would I do that?’
Kaleni looked at her silently, a great weariness in her eyes.
‘We will get to that,’ said Cupido, then nodded to Griessel.
Griessel put the first document on the coffee-table. ‘That is your father’s will. It was drawn up in April of last year. It indicates that your mother will inherit the house in Nuttall Street, as well as the investments he had at the Allan Gray company.’
She stared at it.
Griessel put the next three documents on the table one by one.
‘But he did make provision for you,’ said Cupido. ‘He had taken out three life policies. One for Cebisa Jali, who cleaned for him and whose studies he paid for. And these two for you, as the sole beneficiary. You would have received a total of four and a half million rand . . .’
Thandi began to cry. ‘I never knew that. I swear I never knew that. Mbali, please, you have to believe me. I never knew that . . .’
Kaleni pulled a few tissues out of her pocket – she had taken them from her desk drawer just before they left. She stood up and held them out to Thandi. The woman looked at her with pleading eyes. Kaleni stood patiently and waited until Thandi took the tissues, then turned and sat down again.
‘The problem,’ said Cupido, ‘is that all three of these policies were taken out just after your father drew up his will. That means they are only sixteen months old, and all three have a twenty-four-month suicide clause, as well as a contestability clause. So they won’t be paid out. We think you knew that.’
‘No, no, no! You have it all wrong – you’re making a very big mistake.’
‘Thandi,’ said Cupido, ‘we’ve seen this before. There are a lot of people who have a terminal illness, and want to make provision before taking their own life, but they don’t read the fine—’
‘No!’ It was a cry of despair and grief, loud and shrill in the room, as if it broke her. She jerked, then collapsed into her seat, sobbing into her hands, the braids covering her face. ‘You know me, Mbali . . .’ she said, between shudders. ‘You, of all people, know me . . .’
They let her cry. Minutes ticked by. Eventually she calmed down a bit.
‘We think,’ Cupido continued, ‘you hoped that we would quickly spot the bad forgery of his handwriting. And that we would believe you when you said someone killed him and staged the suicide. The problem is, there is absolutely no evidence that it was staged. None at all.’
‘They killed him.’
‘Every bit of evidence shows that he killed himself. I’m sorry, but those are the facts. Did you pick up the shell casing, Thandi?’
She emerged from behind the hair. Her voice was stronger, as if she could convince them by force of will. ‘No! They killed him. I know they did.’
‘Thandi, he killed himself,’ said Kaleni, speaking for the first time, with a lot of emotion.
‘No,’ said Thandi. She waved her hands in frustration and despair. ‘He didn’t!’
‘We understand—’
‘You don’t. You don’t know anything. You—’ To everyone’s surprise, she jumped up, rushed to the window, fists balled, like someone who was about to explode. She turned around. ‘I did it,’ she said. ‘I forged the note. I did it. It was horrible – it was so horrible. You will never know how difficult it was. But I did it.’
‘Hayi, Thandi,’ said Kaleni.
‘No, you don’t understand . . .’
‘Then help us.’
‘Yes. I’ll tell you the truth.’
‘I would really appreciate that,’ said Kaleni.
Thandi came closer, stood in front of them. ‘The truth is, I never picked up anything – I never saw a shell casing. Yes, I forged that letter. I wrote it. I put it on the table, right there, next to my dead father. I’ll never forget that moment. Never. I wiped the paper and the pen. I was shaking. But I did it, because I needed you to investigate it as a murder. That is what it was. They killed him. I walked into that house, into that kitchen, and I saw him. Sitting like that. That’s not normal. People fall when they shoot themselves. They propped him up like that. They killed him, and then they did that. They are disgusting, evil people.’
‘Who?’ asked Griessel.
‘And why?’ asked Cupido, much more sceptical.
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Thandi. ‘I will tell you everything.’
Chapter 74
Thandi said she’d phoned her father last Saturday, just as she’d told them the first time. She could hear he was depressed. Sad. Like he’d been when his old comrades had attacked him and tried to cast doubt on his reputation because of the declaration against corruption and state capture that he’d signed. She’d asked him what was wrong. He said nothing, nothing was wrong. She asked him what he was doing, and he said he was keeping himself busy with his vegetable garden. He was digging in compost. Then he changed the subject, asked if she had a boyfriend yet. And how her mother was. But she could tell he wasn’t himself.
And then, out of the blue, he told her that if anything happened to him, she should phone Mbali Kaleni. He trusted Mbali.
It shook her, disturbed her deeply. She asked him why he was saying that. What was going on? He could hear how anxious she was. He tried to brush it off, said it was just a joke. Time and again she protested that he was not being truthful with her. He said he was sorry, it was a poor joke, he just wanted to see if she still loved him. She scolded him, told him he couldn’t do that to her.
After the call she kept thinking about it. She put the depressed tone of voice and the reference to Mbali together and convinced herself that something really was wrong. S
o she phoned again. They could check her call register: they would see that it was so.
He’d sounded a bit better during that call, said it was the water restrictions that were getting him down. How could he grow his vegetables, when he couldn’t even get hold of a rainwater tank? If she wanted to do something for him, she could do that. Find a tank somewhere.
‘I wasn’t convinced,’ she said. ‘It just kept bothering me. So I got into my car and I drove to his house.’
‘This was Saturday afternoon?’ asked Cupido.
‘Yes.’
‘Please proceed,’ he said.
When her father opened the door, he seemed broken, and she knew it was a good thing that she’d come. But when he hugged her, he clung to her like a drowning man, and she realised that something very serious had happened.
Menzi Dikela had started weeping, there in the doorway.
‘Do you know what it is like to see your father, this wonderful, strong man, this hero, break down and cry? Do you know what it is like? It kills you a little bit, right here.’ Thandi pressed a finger to her heart, then began to weep. ‘And it kills you even more when he tells you horrible, horrible things.’
She fought to control her emotions, then told them how she and her father had sat down together on the sofa, where she held his hands. He’d said: ‘They are coming to kill me, Thandi. They killed Lonnie, and they will be coming for me. Very soon.’ She could see they wanted to ask who Lonnie was, but she didn’t want to be interrupted. She said Lonnie May was one of her father’s old comrades, one of his best friends. They’d worked together in the new order, first in the Secret Service, later in the SSA, until they retired. She knew Lonnie well. He was a dear man, always mischievous, always busy with something, his nickname was Ubu, short for ububhibhi. The Meerkat.
‘How did Lonnie May die?’ asked Griessel.
‘He died at the airport, last Friday. The official version was that he died of a heart attack. But my father said they killed him. They had the Russians kill him.’
‘The Russians?’ asked Cupido, very sceptical of that. ‘You must be kidding me.’
She just stared at him. A tear trickled down her cheek and her voice was at breaking point. She walked slowly back to the chair, sat down again.
‘My father said it was a sort of blind justice. Because Lonnie probably deserved it, and he, my father, deserved it even more. Because they were murderers. They had killed a man. A good man. A family man. On a train, in August. My father killed a man.’
‘On the Rovos Rail?’ Cupido asked in amazement.
‘Yes. And they killed him to protect something even more terrible.’
Tears flowed and her body shook uncontrollably.
Mbali Kaleni got up from her chair and put her hand on Thandi Dikela’s shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
Thandi nodded through her sobs.
‘Perhaps,’ said Kaleni, ‘I should make us some tea.’
They drank the tea in silence, the two detectives purely out of politeness, because they would have preferred to carry on without a break. They waited patiently until Thandi was ready to resume her story.
After the public protector’s report on state capture two years ago had been leaked to the media, she said, her father had joined a group of sixteen prominent veterans who held a news conference and called on the president and his cronies to resign.
The response was rapid and severe. The corrupt network of cabinet members, party members, security agencies and even the police harassed, isolated, accused, threatened, excluded and smeared them. For Menzi and the fifteen others it was a bitter time. But there was one positive result. More old comrades who were similarly disillusioned and deeply concerned over the flourishing kleptocracy – and the devastating effect of that on the Mandela vision – reached out to them. Gradually, over a period of close to a year, a secret organisation was born: MK43. Forty-three former senior members of Umkhonto we Sizwe. Some were former ministers in President Thabo Mbeki’s cabinet, a few were still members of Parliament. Most were just wise elders, now retired after a lifetime of service.
They looked at every possible solution to stem the destruction of their land and their struggle. Eventually they recognised there was only one answer.
Menzi Dikela and Lonnie May were both involved in the plan now. The forty-three prepared months in advance. They had secret meetings and gatherings, sometimes in strange places: obscure private game reserves, a small holiday resort on the Cedarberg, a remote third-rate hotel on the Wild Coast. Never all forty-three together, always in smaller organising committees. Menzi Dikela managed and controlled their secret communications digitally. Among other things they created false identities, with the accompanying documents, to evade the watchful eyes of the SSA particularly. The risk was enormous that they would be discovered. And it would certainly lead to their demise.
It was the strain of secrecy, of the mortal danger should they be betrayed, that made Menzi and Lonnie decide to combine a crucial planning meeting with a short luxury holiday. A small treat after all the stress, their plans so close to fruition. They had to go to Pretoria in any case, and the Rovos train was quite out of the ordinary, something the SSA wouldn’t be watching. Above all, it would be easy to discuss the final preparations in the privacy of their compartments.
And then they made a mistake.
‘My dad saw a man in the train’s restaurant who looked familiar, but he couldn’t place him. Because the man was young, and he was with this little old lady, Dad didn’t consider him a risk. He said he and Lonnie had a few glasses of wine, and for the first time in months they were relaxed, not as vigilant as they should have been. They walked back to their compartments together, my father went into his, and Lonnie stood in the doorway. They were talking – they were sure there was no one else because they had been alone in the passage. They got careless, just for a moment. They were talking about their big solution to the state-capture problem, and then my dad moved, and saw the man from the restaurant carriage standing behind Lonnie, listening. And he could see the man had heard them, because of the look on his face. The man introduced himself, pretending he hadn’t heard anything. He said he was Johnson, and that he’d met both of them a few years ago when he was still with the police VIP Protection Unit, when he was the minister of security’s bodyguard. He just wanted to come pay his respects. And he asked how they were. But it was an uncomfortable conversation, my father said. Despite his best efforts to seem nonchalant, it was obvious that Johnson had overheard them.
‘Johnson left, and my father and Lonnie had to make a decision fast. It wasn’t just the operation that was at stake, it was the lives of all forty-three comrades. Their lives. Their everything. So, Dad took his knife, his biltong knife – it was the only weapon they had between them. And they followed Johnson, saw him enter his compartment and shut the door. They didn’t know if he had locked it. So they stood outside. Other passengers were coming from the dining car, so they pretended to walk away. And then they returned, tried the door, and it was open. Johnson was standing with his back to the door, talking on the phone, very intense, reporting what he’d heard. They realised they had to act very fast, and my father stabbed him with the knife. He said he panicked, he was desperate, he just . . . he just . . .’ She sobbed again, hid her face.
‘Do you want to take a moment?’ asked Kaleni.
She shook her head. ‘He stabbed him with all his might. The blade broke off. Lonnie shut the door and jumped on Johnson, too.’
Thandi said Johnson fell across the bed, with Menzi and Lonnie on top of him. They didn’t think the single stab to the back of the head was fatal and they wanted to make sure. They were ready for a fight, to strangle him if necessary. But it wasn’t. Johnson just lay there, dead still. Menzi had come to his senses first, made sure Johnson’s call had ended.
They stood up. The two old men were shaking, in shock, overcome by the sudden violence and deadly outcome. Johnson’s phone began to rin
g. Menzi feverishly ripped out the battery. He put the phone and the battery in Johnson’s jacket pocket. Lonnie locked the door. Then they sat on the bed beside the body. Slowly they pulled themselves together, discussed their situation in whispers. Made a plan. Later, when the railway line veered away from the N1 and the chances of the body being found decreased, they would throw Johnson off the train. In the meantime Lonnie would stay in the compartment, as they had to be sure the door was locked from the inside.
Menzi tossed the handle of his Okapi out of the window. He saw a laptop on the bedside table. He took it with him, so he could check whether Johnson was involved in any way with the SSA. You never knew, he might have been a plant.
In the early hours, with a great deal of struggle they manhandled the body out of the window. Johnson wasn’t a small man.
Then they made up the bed, and pushed his suitcase deep underneath.
‘For the rest of the journey they were scared, because they didn’t know how much information Johnson had given the people he called. They were filled with trepidation when they arrived because by then the Rovos people knew that Johnson had disappeared. But nothing happened. And my father thought they’d got away with it . . . until Lonnie was killed.’
She took a deep breath, as if she had offloaded a heavy burden.
‘Thandi, how could your father be so sure that Lonnie May was killed?’ asked Griessel. ‘That it wasn’t just a heart attack, from all the stress?’
‘Because they told him.’
‘Who?’
‘A man by the name of Zungu. A big man, my father said. Very big. A very dangerous man. He was at my father’s house on Friday night. And two other men. All from the State Security Agency. They told him they’d had Lonnie killed. With a Russian drug. And that they would do something unimaginably terrible to him unless he told them everything.’
Chapter 75
Menzi Dikela told them nothing. He denied everything. They said, think it over, think it over very carefully, because they would be back.